Across Canada, warm, wet weather has created ideal conditions for swarms of mosquitos

Warm, wet weather has created ideal conditions for swarms of mosquitos

A wetter-than-normal spring and a hotter-than-average summer ahead have provided the perfect conditions for a national mosquito massacre — if you haven’t noticed the nipping just yet, it’s about to get bad.

Alberta’s floods have left a lot of standing water. Across the rest of the Prairies, the spring thaw after a heavy winter snow has done the same. Parts of the Maritimes have seen double the average levels of rain in the past few months. Ontario has had consistent rainfall.

Couple that with the onset of the “dog days of summer” in the next few weeks — that period toward the end of July and early August — and you’ve got prime conditions for blood-sucking bugs, the scourge of the Canadian summer.

“You could imagine out there there’s a lot of mosquito sex waiting to happen,” said Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips. “The breeding grounds are there in abundance.”

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Mosquitoes thrive in tropical conditions and breed near water, whether it’s a pond or a reservoir of rain water trapped in a backyard wheelbarrow. While temperatures in some parts of the country, such as the stretch from Windsor to Peterborough in Ontario, are expected to remain around normal, everywhere from “Vancouver to Bonavista” is slated to be warmer than average, Mr. Phillips said. “My sense is we haven’t seen anything yet, that it’s about to break out.”

Of course, municipalities and provinces have been working hard to control the mosquito population. In Ottawa, mosquito trap counts have risen more than 50%.

The City of Winnipeg’s entomologist, Taz Stuart, brought in in 2004 with the superhero-style mandate of taming a population of famously massive mosquitoes, says the city’s notorious bloodsuckers are fairly under control this year.

Several weeks ago, a big storm dropping approximately five inches of rain an hour created many “larval habitats” in the city’s south end, Mr. Stuart said in email to the Post Thursday.

A mosquito trap in Assiniboine Park caught a “blood-chilling” 560 bugs on Monday, spiking the average for the entire city.

The Insect Control Branch has been “aggressively larviciding” that southwest part of the city but hasn’t needed to use the even more aggressive measure of “fogging” — emitting a large cloud of insecticide — just yet.

Data from the City of Edmonton show the mosquito population is slightly down from last year, but the numbers don’t tick upward until at least early July, city officials said. “Nuisance mosquitoes” were particularly bad in the city in mid-July 2010.

Entomologists in Nova Scotia are linking their increased mosquito population this year with the near extinction of their brown bats to white nose syndrome, a mysterious fungal disease believed to have killed upward of 5.5 million bats in North America.

“It’s caused a loss of 90, 95% of our little brown bats, a dominant species here,” said Andrew Hebda, the curator of zoology at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax. The increased population of mosquitoes is one of the “costs” of the bat’s decline, because it has cut out one of their predators.

“Mosquitoes are cold blooded, so the warmer it is, the faster their generation time,” he said. “That combination of lots of moisture and heat right now means we’re probably going to have more generations of mosquitoes this year than we have had in other years.” Mosquitoes typically breed six to seven generations in the spring and summer months, he said.

“It seems to be one of the better years for insects, so worse for us,” he said.

For the estimated 80 different species of mosquito in Canada, a wet spring transitioning to a hot and dry summer is completely ideal, said Bob Anderson, a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

Mosquitoes are cold blooded, so the warmer it is, the faster their generation time

“If it stays wet, people stay indoors and you probably don’t hear about it as much simply because people aren’t exposed to it and carrying out outdoor activities,” he said. “But if you get a situation where you get rain and then really nice weather and everybody goes flying out for barbecues and picnics, the mosquitoes just inhale them from there. It’s dinner on a plate.”

To truly understand the effect mosquitoes are expected to have on Canadians this summer, Mr. Hebda points us no further than the golf green.

“This is the kind of a season where you want to be a good golfer because if you’re a bad golfer, you’ll end up … knocking your ball into the woods, that’s woods where there’s no wind so lots of mosquitoes,” he said. “In other words, play good golf, otherwise you’d probably be better off to just stay home.”

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